Just as in designing commercial organizations, such as business structure and makeup, it is often desirable to design non-commercial and military organizations. In this regard, the Future Combat Systems (FCS) program is an integral component, with other key complementary U.S. Government and commercial programs, in the U.S. Army's goal to be “fully transformed” and attain “objective force” by the end of this decade. More particularly, it is the goal of the FCS program to design a force structure comprising a networked “system of systems”—one large system made up of eighteen individual systems, plus the network, plus the soldier. It utilizes advanced communications and technologies to link soldiers with both manned and unmanned ground and air platforms and sensors. The FCS force structure is agile—allowing forces to move quickly—and versatile—which allows troops to conduct a variety of missions.
During conceptual design of a force structure, such as in accordance with the FCS program, characteristics of each weapon system (e.g., missile system, radio system, sensor system, armored vehicle system, etc.) that comprises a force may be undefined or are free to vary through continuous and/or discrete space. Further, the quantities of the individual weapon, sensor or support systems, or their ratios and proportions in the context of the entire force structure, are free to move through nominal space. It is obvious that the available trade space for this type of problem is quite large. And in the context of the FCS program, the difficulty in evaluating the trade space is compounded by the USA/DARPA requirement to assess each alternative with respect to seven distinct objective functions (mobility, lethality, knowledgeability, survivability, sustainability, deployability and affordability).
Traditional defense acquisitions and the associated analysis (within the USA and industry) have evolved to replace or introduce unitary systems (e.g., single missile system, radio system, armored vehicle system, etc.) into an existing and fixed force structure. The trade space, therefore, has traditionally been relatively modest and the models/tools, consequently, have very limited abilities to explore trade space. In the context of the seven objective functions, existing processes parcel-out the analysis to stove-piped organizations. For example, a logistics organization may apply its methods to a proposed set of configurations, while a finance organization evaluates the costs of the proposed set of configurations, and an operations analysis organization evaluates force or operational effectiveness. These analysis issues severely limit the ability to explore design space and generally take an inordinate amount of time.